This 1968 Dodge Charger Named ‘Tater’ Got a Supercharged Hellcat Heart — Then the Torque Ripped the Intake Apart

A YouTuber dropped a supercharged Hellcat V8 into his 1968 Dodge Charger chasing 1,500 horsepower, and the swap didn’t go quietly — the torque twisted the chassis off the line and blew the supercharger’s intake apart before the video even wrapped. Here’s the story behind ‘Tater,’ one of the wilder modern Mopar engine swaps making the rounds this year.

Some engine swaps make a car faster. This one nearly tore itself apart doing it. When YouTuber Westen Champlin dropped a supercharged Hellcat V8 into his 1968 Dodge Charger — a car he’s nicknamed “Tater” — he wasn’t chasing a factory horsepower number. He was chasing whatever the chassis could survive. Within the first hard pull, the torque twisted the frame visibly off the line, and before the video was over, the supercharger’s own intake setup had blown apart under boost. It’s the kind of build that turns a 58-year-old muscle car into something closer to a live grenade — and nearly two million views later, people are still watching to see what breaks next.

The Swap That Was Never Going to Be Gentle

Westen Champlin has built a reputation on YouTube for engine swaps that are more demolition derby than blueprint, and Tater is exhibit A. Rather than dropping in a numbers-matching Mopar big block, he went straight for a supercharged 6.2-liter Hellcat V8 — the same engine family Dodge used to push modern Challengers and Chargers to 707 horsepower straight from the factory. Champlin’s build is aimed well past that factory baseline, and he’s been upfront in the video’s own title that he’s chasing 1,500 horsepower, a number that has nothing to do with anything Dodge ever certified and everything to do with how far a home-built supercharged combination can be pushed before something gives.

Something gave almost immediately. Commenters who watched the swap go in didn’t dwell on the horsepower claim so much as what happened the moment the engine actually made power: the chassis twisted visibly under the torque as the car left the line, and the supercharger’s intake didn’t survive first contact with real boost. One viewer joked that the car’s signature move should be studied in engineering school; another asked, half-serious, whether Champlin needed a warning light for when the manifold was in danger. It’s the kind of unscripted chaos that’s made his channel appointment viewing for anyone who likes their muscle car content a little bit reckless.

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For longtime viewers, the drama is part of the draw. Champlin has built his channel around pushing engines and drivetrains past their limits and documenting exactly how they fail, and Tater’s build fits that pattern perfectly — commenters under the video reference earlier breakages on other projects and openly campaign for a crossover episode with other well-known horsepower-chasing Mopar creators. It’s less a polished restoration story and more a running experiment in how much power a vintage unibody can absorb before something lets go.

That approach also explains why a channel built around backyard fabrication keeps pulling in numbers most professional shops would envy. Nobody tunes in expecting a magazine-clean build sheet; they tune in because Champlin treats every install like a live test of the car’s structural limits, and this one happened to fail in a particularly dramatic way on camera. The supercharger belt whipping loose and the intake letting go weren’t scripted setbacks — they were the actual build process, filmed in real time and posted with the failures left in rather than cut around.

The 1968 Charger’s Second Act

The second-generation Dodge Charger, built from 1968 through 1970, is one of the most recognizable shapes in American muscle car history, and the sales numbers back up how big a leap the redesign was. Dodge moved roughly 96,100 Chargers for the 1968 model year, more than six times the 15,788 units sold in 1967 — proof that the fastback’s new fuselage styling turned a slow seller into a genuine hit almost overnight. The R/T package brought serious hardware to match the looks: a standard 440 Magnum V8 rated at 375 horsepower and 480 lb-ft of torque, with the option to step up to the 426 Hemi for buyers willing to pay a $605 premium for the ultimate factory Mopar engine.

That Hemi option was never common. Dodge built only 475 Chargers with the 426 Hemi in 1968, out of more than 17,000 R/Ts sold that year, which is exactly why genuine numbers-matching Hemi Chargers now command well into six figures at auction. That kind of scarcity pushes builders who actually want to drive and abuse a ’68 Charger toward cars like Tater — one that’s clearly been modified hard and isn’t precious about preserving factory history. Swapping in a modern supercharged Hemi derivative keeps the build in the Mopar family while sidestepping any pressure to protect an untouched original.

Why a Hellcat Swap Hits Different in a ’68

Dodge’s Hellcat engine family is itself a factory answer to what builders like Champlin do in their garages: take a proven V8 and force enough air into it to make absurd power. The supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi debuted in the 2015 Challenger SRT Hellcat rated at 707 horsepower and 650 lb-ft of torque, and Dodge later pushed the same architecture even higher in its Redeye and Demon variants. Dropping that engine into a unibody engineered around a naturally aspirated 440 is a mismatch by design — the Charger’s factory frame, motor mounts, and driveline were never built around forced induction, which is exactly why the build ran into trouble the moment real boost hit the tires.

That mismatch is the whole appeal for an audience that’s already seen plenty of clean, professional restomod builds. Tater’s Hellcat swap is messier and more honest about the process — the failures are part of the content, not something edited around. There’s also a practical case for the swap beyond spectacle: a built Hellcat engine is far easier to source parts for than an original 426 Hemi, and the aftermarket support for the modern Hemi platform dwarfs anything available for the vintage big block. For a builder who wants huge, reliable-ish power in a car he’s actually going to thrash on camera, the modern engine is the more sensible choice — even when “sensible” still ends with a blown intake manifold.

None of that means the build is finished. Blown intakes and twisted chassis mounts are exactly the kind of setbacks that turn a one-off video into a series, and Champlin’s audience has made it clear in the comments that they expect a follow-up once the car is reinforced enough to survive its own engine. Whether Tater ever sees a real dyno number or a quarter-mile pass is almost beside the point — the appeal has always been watching a vintage Mopar get pushed past what its factory engineers ever planned for, one broken part at a time.

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